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Hans Kleefeld’s corporate logos became part of Canadian landscape

Berlin-born designer, who died March 10 at age 86, created logos that have endured for decades — from Tim Hortons to Air Canada to TD Bank.

Hans Kleefeld trusted his own hand-drawn renderings long after the dawn of the computer age. The Berlin-born designer died in Toronto on March 10, age 86.

By Wayne LarsenSpecial to the Star

Sun., March 27, 2016

It’s safe to say that most Canadians couldn’t get through an average day without seeing at least one Tim Hortons logo, Air Canada’s iconic red maple leaf or the green TD Bank sign.

But few have heard of Hans Kleefeld, the man who conceived these and many more of the country’s instantly recognizable images — simple and dynamic masterpieces of corporate branding that have endured for decades.

Kleefeld, a German-born designer, died in Toronto on March 10, at age 86. He is remembered by colleagues as a humble but no-nonsense, innovative graphic artist and teacher who applied European ideas to produce Canadian corporate images — from the Bank of Montreal’s stylized blue M to the curved-line composition of the old Scarborough Town Centre logo and the Tudor-style calligraphy of the Stratford Festival.

Born in Berlin in 1929, Kleefeld came of age amid the chaos of the Second World War, which indirectly set him upon his career path while he was studying at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts.

“One of the stories he related to me was that when he was about 16, at the end of the war, there were a lot of bombed-out buildings in Berlin,” said Bill Ross, a former colleague of Kleefeld at Sheridan College. “He was rooting around in the basement of a department store and discovered a cache of design magazines.”

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That magazine, Gebrauchsgraphik, opened the young Kleefeld’s eyes to the world of graphic design, and the advantages of an arts education.

“Reading through these issues I was surprised to learn that the majority of graphic and exhibit designers, illustrators and photographers active in the mid-20th century had never formally studied at any college, academy or university,” Kleefeld later wrote.

Unlike today, when students produce designs by clicking a mouse, Kleefeld was taught to create with what was then state-of-the-art technology: his hands.

“The challenges,” he wrote, “of laying down a perfectly flat colour, poster-size, in gouache with a brush, or to hand-render 10-point Bodoni, were enough to have weaker spirits consider switching to something less taxing, such as milk delivery.”

Kleefeld came to Canada in 1952, later regaling friends with a classic immigrant’s tale of arriving with just a few dollars in his pocket and some clothes stuffed into a duffel bag. He found work in advertising, and was eventually hired by Clair Stewart, a partner in the design firm Stewart & Morrison Ltd. Stewart was well connected in the business world and his tenacity in drumming up contracts brought a wide variety of assignments to Kleefeld’s drawing board, including Air Canada and TD Bank.

“From the Air Canada logo and graphic standards to his enduring identity for the Bank of Montreal, no other Canadian designer had that level of impact over that kind of time span, with the possible exception of Burton Kramer (who created the CBC logo),” said OCAD University design professor Steve Quinlan, who knew Kleefeld for nearly 30 years. “The impact of that level of accomplishment on students is immeasurable!”

“All those great logos he did in the 1950s and ’60s were hand-rendered,” added Ross, describing Kleefeld as a late adoptee of computer technology. “For the first five years after we hired him, it would take several days to get an answer from an email because he’d have to go to the library to use the computers there.”

In 40 years of teaching corporate identity and design at OCAD, and more recently at Sheridan College in Oakville, Kleefeld kept things strictly old-school.

“He brought in physical examples and put them up on the wall to analyze and talk about them,” Ross said. “He never changed from that mode of teaching, and that made him stand out from all his contemporaries — everyone else was showing these jazzy PDFs and animated presentations.”

This was typical of Kleefeld, who preached simplicity to his students. “The whole nature of corporate identity is taking a lot of ideas of what a company stands for and getting to the core of it, distilling it down to a simple message,” Ross said, adding that Kleefeld hated Ontario’s new provincial logo — a stylized trillium introduced in 2006.

“Hans liked Ontario’s previous logo, which was based on geometry and very clear — but he called the new one ‘Three men in a hot tub.’”

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